┐ The House With the Ocean View └

This post serves the sole purpose of sharing documentation about my favorite Marina Abramovic’s performance: “The House with the Ocean View”. There are not many photographs available on the web, so here is a a contribution.

photo documentation (day 1 – day 4) photographs by Attilio Maranzano

photo documentation (day 5 – day 8) photographs by Attilio Maranzano

photo documentation (day 9 – day 12) photographs by Attilio Maranzano

“In The House with the Ocean View, performed at Sean Kelly Gallery as a continuous 12-day “living installation” of such a form of pure presence, Abramovic gives a new and unexpected twist to the art world’s current over-saturation with cacophonous multimedia environments and conceptual  installations. The gallery becomes her “house”, a sanctuary for a limited period of time in a city smitten with paranoia and fear of terror. We attend her imaginary ocean front, watch her in silence as she watches us. We become the ocean, so to speak, and Abramovic needs us in order to concentrate her energies. The visit to the “house”, three specially constructed living units-bedroom, sitting room, bathroom-halfway up the wall at one end of the open whites pace, is subject to a strict agreement that we enter when coming inside. As she subjects herself to fasting and silent meditation, interrupted only by banal actions of showering, peeing, and drinking water, she expects us to respect he discipline and the restrictions of such  an ordeal and observe her in equal silence.”

excerpt of Marina Abramovic on the Ledge, by Johannes Birringer, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 66-70